Andrew Fox: Over Our Heads

In the New Year, I compiled dossiers of syllabus samples and student evaluations to bring to the Modern Language Association’s hiring fair. I’d managed to schedule three interviews, while Darren had arranged just one for the sake of testing the waters. We took the Amtrak to DC together and shared a room at the department’s expense. In the mornings, we dressed in thermals and parkas and trudged through the snow to see panels. In the afternoons, I changed into a sports coat and took my number in the huge and echoing interview hall at the Four Points Sheraton.

At my first two sessions, I distilled my research and plotted my timeline for finishing. The interviewers nodded with feigned or tepid interest. But at my third session, I heard myself say that my ‘wife’ was expecting our first child. Professor Dessa Greene — a young, goofy Victorianist from a medium-sized university in western Indiana — brightened and produced on her phone an image of her own son, nineteen weeks old and frog-faced, who at that moment was touring the Lincoln Memorial papoosed at his father’s chest.

‘The thing I like most about our department,’ Dessa said, ‘is that they understand the need to balance your work with your life. We’re a young faculty, and there’ll be a place for your family with us if we hire you.’

I left feeling cautious but hopeful. I called Carol but she didn’t answer. I caught the bus to Georgetown to meet Darren for burgers and beers. His own interview, he told me, had been a disaster.

‘Fucking philistines,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t recognize subtlety of thought if it bit them in the face. This game is rigged, friend-o. We should’ve just got real jobs.’

At the next table, a group of business-school types in blazers and khakis sipped from heavy glasses of Ketel One.

‘Look at these assholes,’ Darren said. ‘They’re the guys who beat the shit out of me in school. So I beat them at school. And I stayed in school forever. And now school is almost over, and it’s back to their rules again.’

I told him about Dessa Greene.

‘The family man,’ he snorted. ‘Christ. The kid’s not even born yet and already you’re leveraging the poor little bastard. Well, good for you. That’s how the game is played. Apparently.’

Carol wouldn’t be persuaded to take things easy. She’d work, she said, for as long as she could bear it to stockpile personal days and extend her maternity leave. I rehearsed what I would say to her should the offer ever come from Indiana, tried to think of anything that might make her want to move.

We enrolled in a birthing class that met three evenings a week in a basement in Cobble Hill. The facilitator, Sarabeth — we were instructed never to use the word ‘teacher’, because ‘this kind of learning comes from within’ — padded barefoot from couple to cross-legged couple, whispering encouragements in a voice well suited to her work but even better to night-time radio. Carol breathed in sync with my count, which often was distracted and arrhythmic. ‘You’ve been a student your whole goddamn life,’ she said as I tugged her to her feet and fetched her shoes. ‘Why is it so hard for you to learn this one easy thing?’

We rented a Zipcar and drove it to a mall in Jersey, Carol gripping the wheel around her belly because I’d never gotten a licence. The mall smelled clean and sweet, like new stationery. We bought a crib and a stars-and-moons mobile to hang above it, a changing table and something called a diaper genie. The disposable or plastic items were bulky and preassembled. The wooden things were packed flat in cardboard boxes. I carried them all to the car and from the car up the stairs to the apartment. We filled what little space there was in the big hall closet and in the drawers beneath the bed.

I packed a box with my binders and took it to my carrel. I felt as though I’d fallen behind. Whenever I wasn’t working, I noticed a chill beneath my arms and in my throat. But then, one morning in late January — with three missed calls from Carol, a whole suite of furniture left to assemble, and a leafless tree branch bobbing to the beat of frozen rain outside my window — I realized that I was finished. I drank a flask of coffee and spent a night cleaning up citations. And the following morning, in a haze, I printed a manuscript copy of the dissertation and left it in my supervisor’s mailbox.

With nothing to work on, I spent long hours alone in the apartment. Letters and baby books began arriving with a Dublin postmark. I spoke more frequently with my mother, who was off her crutches and keen to plan her first visit to New York. I checked the job boards hourly for updates, bought a lock for the toilet seat and covers for the electric sockets. I hit the gym both mornings and evenings, got my mile time down to seven minutes.

For Valentine’s Day, I reserved a table at Carol’s favourite place in Gramercy. But on the night, she said she felt too tired to go out. We ordered a take-out feast from the Japanese place on Court and gorged ourselves on edamame and gyoza and teriyaki. Afterwards, we lay on the couch flicking between romantic comedies. The baby was kicking. Of course, I’d felt it before, had marvelled over it with Carol in the night. But now it was just a nuisance. She dug her shoulder under my ribs. I groaned and reached out to help her.

‘Not now ,’ she said. ‘Jesus, just give me a minute? Just let me …’ She pulled a pillow out from beneath her and sighed. ‘That’s better.’

The film we had settled on took place in London. The snow was too flaky. Everyone wore turtlenecks.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘you’re always pulling away from me.’

‘What I am,’ Carol said through her teeth, ‘is seven and a half months pregnant. Have a bit of compassion, will you? I feel like a fucking boat.’

The film cut to time-lapse footage of Piccadilly Circus: the sun a fixed point on an endlessly spinning wheel; taxis scurrying through the streets like ants; our protagonist fixed at the centre of it all, unmoving. I realized that Carol was crying.

‘Shit,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

She shook her head but the sobs kept coming, catching in her throat with a strangling sound and stopping her from breathing. I ran to the sink to fetch a glass of water and held it to her lips. She tried to sip but gagged and knocked the glass from my hand. It hit the floor with a thud but it didn’t break. She shook her head again, tears running down her cheeks.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said and looked at me. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry but you need to know — you’re not the father.’

I watched her bend to pick up the glass and place it on the coffee table. I watched her take a tea towel from the counter and kneel to mop the floor.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Please wait. I really thought you were. I mean, I really hoped you might be.’

I started speaking, started shouting, but everything I said, everything I tried to persuade myself that I was feeling, was a lie. It was only much later, after Carol had passed out on the couch, tear-stained and utterly exhausted, and I stood over her, watching her, that I accepted the truth. What I had felt was not anger but shame; what I had wanted from her was not love but guilt. It rose up inside me with an undeniable clarity: I had known that I was not the baby’s father all along.

In the morning, Carol went back to her sister’s place. I phoned the department from the couch to cancel my classes, and there I lay, uncertain as to why or how I might get up again.

On the second day, she began to call me hourly. I turned off my phone.

On the third, she sent me messages on Facebook. I stopped checking my account.

She wrote long emails: I made a mistake and I wanted to tell you but you were so happy and you made me feel so happy and so safe and I was so afraid . I stopped reading them. I deleted them all. I blocked her email address.